Terrifying baby robot has crawled right out of my dirt nightmares and into my dirt heart

A rolling stone gathers no moss, but a crawling baby picks up hella dirt — or, more specifically, a bunch of bacteria, dead skin cells, and maybe even some fungal spores. In order to better understand just how much of these gross particles babies are inhaling, researchers over at Purdue built a “simplified robot crawling infant.”

This tinfoil-wrapped cyclops, spotted by Boing Boing, mashes its golf club-like — arms? — arms onto the floor to simulate how much dust a real baby would kick up. According to Purdue’s findings, which were published in the journal Environmental Science & Technology, not only did this filth child stir up a cloud of nasty particles with a concentration as much as 20 times greater than geographically higher spots...